Orbiting Death Rays, Friending Putin and More Great Ideas From Planet Newt

Say this for Newt Gingrich: He's not afraid to sound off with big ideas. It's given him a reputation as one of the deeper thinkers in politics. Problem is, when it comes to defense and foreign policy, the current GOP presidential frontrunner's big ideas are often crazy.

Some of Gingrich's notions sounded kinda-sorta good at the time (don't sweat independent terror groups), only to be revealed later as wrong-headed. Others (lasers vs. North Korea) were face-palmers from the start. But now that Gingrich is once again a major national figure, it's time to take a new look at Newtisms that could translate into Pentagon plans.

Here's a guide to Newt's Contract With Planet Earth.

Blast North Korea With Lasers

In April of 2009, Gingrich went on Fox News to declare that North Korea's impending missile launch must be stopped — with "whatever preemptive actions are necessary." To do otherwise would be inviting disaster, he added. "Allowing the North Koreans to launch missiles is an enormously dangerous threat in the long run."

Luckily, America had the means to stop the launch before it ever happened, Gingrich said: "I think you could take it out with very, very minimal risk to anybody."

All you'd have to do is dip into the Pentagon's arsenal of ray guns.

"I'd find a way to have either a small team go in, or a way to deliver either a laser or another kind of device," Gingrich noted.

Gingrich was likely talking about the Airborne Laser, the jumbo jet tricked out with a missile-zapping directed energy cannon. As Speaker of the House, Newt had intervened several times to keep the project alive, despite broken deadlines and mushrooming costs.

Not long after Gingrich's suggestion to use the laser, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates radically scaled back the Airborne Laser effort — and repeatedly pointed to it as an example of everything that was dumb and wrong about the Pentagon's weapon-development process.

By the way, that North Korean launch? Total flop. The missile's first stage fell into the Sea of Japan, and the remaining stages landed in the Pacific Ocean — no lasers required.

Photo: Wikimedia

Blast North Korea With Lasers

In April of 2009, Gingrich went on Fox News to declare that North Korea's impending missile launch must be stopped — with "whatever preemptive actions are necessary." To do otherwise would be inviting disaster, he added. "Allowing the North Koreans to launch missiles is an enormously dangerous threat in the long run."

Luckily, America had the means to stop the launch before it ever happened, Gingrich said: "I think you could take it out with very, very minimal risk to anybody."

All you'd have to do is dip into the Pentagon's arsenal of ray guns.

"I'd find a way to have either a small team go in, or a way to deliver either a laser or another kind of device," Gingrich noted.

Gingrich was likely talking about the Airborne Laser, the jumbo jet tricked out with a missile-zapping directed energy cannon. As Speaker of the House, Newt had intervened several times to keep the project alive, despite broken deadlines and mushrooming costs.

Not long after Gingrich's suggestion to use the laser, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates radically scaled back the Airborne Laser effort — and repeatedly pointed to it as an example of everything that was dumb and wrong about the Pentagon's weapon-development process.

By the way, that North Korean launch? Total flop. The missile's first stage fell into the Sea of Japan, and the remaining stages landed in the Pacific Ocean — no lasers required.

Photo: Wikimedia

Put Anti-Missiles in Orbit

It's been a long, looooong time since anyone in the Pentagon took seriously the idea of ringing the Earth with a series of anti-missiles. Not only is the technology far-fetched, the costs are prohibitive (hundreds of orbiting interceptors ain't cheap, after all). There are serious questions about everything from space debris to the command-and-control of the space weapons.

Questions for some. Not for Newt Gingrich. Way after the fantastical Star Wars era of missile defense was over, Gingrich was still enthusiastically promoting the idea of shooting down ballistic missiles from space.

"They'd be deployed in space," Gingrich affirmed. "If I could have a satellite in space that guaranteed that you could stop a missile in the boost phase, and as a result you didn't lose Los Angeles or Atlanta or Washington, I would think that was a pretty good trade."

Somehow, Gingrich has yet to convince the Pentagon to make that deal.

Don't Worry About Terror Groups

Back in the mid-'90s, plenty of political leaders shrugged their shoulders at the specter of stateless terrorists. And that included Newt.

It wasn't exactly the best timing. The month before Gingrich's speech, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa urging jihadis to kill Americans. And precisely such a "private group" had detonated a truck bomb under the World Trade Center in 1993. But Gingrich had his eye on other threats — namely, government-backed terrorism.

"Let's [set aside] pure, true terrorism by random individuals and tiny groups — that's the FBI's problem," he offered. "But anytime there is systematic, organized support by a state, that is a military/diplomatic problem and should be dealt with by the intelligence agencies, the military, and the State Department at the highest levels."

There were leaders that were further off-base about terrorism before 9/11 — remember how Attorney General John Ashcroft told his staff he "did not want to hear about terrorism" during the summer of 2001? But few claimed that you could "almost always track" those terrorists, either. If only.

"Now, he's more authoritarian than I might like," Gingrich admitted. "But again, this is a country in dramatic transition. And when you look back 12 or 13 years, even his authoritarianism is remarkably more open as a society than anything one could have dreamed as late as 1987 or 1988."

"So I think that you're likely to see an emerging continuing American-Russian friendship," Gingrich added. "I think that's a very good sign for the relatively near future in Russia."

Block the Great Iranian Missile Attack of 2003

The defining characteristic of our security era is the fact that we live in fear of the intercontinental ballistic missiles possessed by Iran, North Korea and Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Any moment now, the unstable leaders of these rogue states could push a button and launch a missile halfway around the world to blast an American city. That's what Newt thought would be a certainty — by 2003.

Now, obviously Iran and North Korea don't have ICBMs, and Saddam is dead. But even though Gingrich's timetable was about up, in February 2002 Gingrich said one of Rumsfeld's "great discoveries" was that "there is an axis, there is a relationship between these countries," affirming President Bush's "Axis of Evil" declaration. Never let the evidence get in the way of a good scary story.

Photo: Flickr/Mightyohm

Gut the State Department

Newt Gingrich didn't reach into his pocket and produce a list of disloyal Americans working as diplomats. But in an April 2003 speech, he did the next best thing. He said the Department's practice of, y'know, diplomacy emboldened to "a campaign seeking to defeat U.S. foreign policy objectives articulated by Bush" ahead of the invasion of Iraq. His solution: Give State "culture shock, a top-to-bottom transformation" that would place it "more directly under the control of the president of the United States."

In that speech and its subsequent adaptation into a Foreign Policy magazine cover story called "Rogue State Department," Gingrich was maddeningly vague and contradictory about what specifically he wanted State to become. He wanted to make it easier for the president to fire foreign service officers and make the Foreign Service "at least 40 percent larger." But the essence of his suggestions were clear: abandon the traditional focus on diplomatic "process" and make the State Department "promote freedom and combat tyranny" — once firmly under the control of the Bush White House.

Hack the Planet

There's a fringe scientific movement out there that argues the only way to stop catastrophic climate change is to take active measures to essentially terraform the earth. The idea behind "geoengineering" is to, say, launch sulfur particles into the upper atmosphere to intercept sunlight or genetically modify plants to become living carbon vacuum cleaners. What could go wrong! It's "a bad idea whose time has come," according to geoengineering chronicler Eli Kintisch, something that "viscerally is almost sickening" to the scientists who study it.

So why do they study it at all? "A desperate politician 30 years from now may suddenly decide, 'I need to cool the planet,'" Kintisch told Alexis Madrigal last year. "And if we don't study it, scientists won't have any way to warn this leader of what the consequences will be." Newt Gingrich wants to be that leader.

And Gingrich isn't waiting 30 years, either. He's backed geoengineering as a cheap way to rein in climate change, right now. "Geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global-warming concerns for just a few billion dollars a year," Gingrich said in 2008. It has a certain appeal if you already want to avoid costly or politically distasteful international efforts to limit carbon emissions. Suddenly, you can "bring on American ingenuity [and] stop the green pig," as Gingrich put it back then. It helps if you don't pay attention to the foreseeable consequences of thinking you're smarter than Mother Nature.

It's ironic: Gingrich spent a fair amount of time around then deriding the CIA for overly rosy predictions about Saddam or rogue-state missile capabilities. (Which, er, were eventually proven right.) But then he fell victim to his own wishful thinking about the end of the Iranian theocracy. Iranians were disillusioned with the regime: "in every election the reformists defeat it." So perhaps with a little U.S. diplomatic outreach, the Iranian revolution would be on the ash heap of history by the middle of the decade. Never mind that he was simultaneously warning that Iran would soon have missiles capable of wiping American cities off the map.

Alas, the Iranian regime proved way more resilient. Not only did it not give way to reform, the reformists gave way to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then demonstrated it could withstand an outpouring of popular resentment by crushing the Green Movement of 2009. Now it looks like it's building a nuclear weapon, with the hardliners in control. And Gingrich is now calling for regime change — and promising that overthrowing the Iranian government will only take a year. Some things never change.

Fear the Ultimate Blue Screen of Death

At the Republican national security debate a few weeks back, while others warned of a rising China or a nuclear Iran, Gingrich raised a very different kind of threat: "an electromagnetic pulse attack, which would literally destroy the country's capacity to function."

Sounds scary, right? In theory, sure. All electronics are susceptible to being fried by all sorts of radiation, both natural and man-made. But could a single weapon really be the "civilization-ending threat" that Gingrich described?

Doubtful, says Stephen Younger, a former senior fellow at Los Alamos National Lab and director at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.